Nuclear Physics Day, 2026
Preface
There were lots of people that I met and talked to on this day. I’ve completely made up a bunch of stand-in pseudonyms for them.
Nuclear Physics Day, 2026
Arising, Somewhere Around U St.
I did not sleep well. I slept on Eddy’s couch. It luckily did fit the length of my supinate body, unlike the couch in Grandma and Grandpa’s living room. (That is why I actually crash on the floor over there.) Now, it is simply characteristic of me to not tamper with many of the things in somebody else’s place. So, I went to sleep without turning off the lights. At least I tried.
I was about halfway there when I heard Eddy finished watching Rick & Morty upstairs. He came down the stairs, messed around a bit in the kitchen, and did me the service of turning off the lights. (He would later ask me when I came back that evening if I heard this commotion.) I was never able to achieve a state of total unconsciousness; I most certainly was always bubbling a bit above that threshold. I woke up some time in the deep of night and gazed at the night sky through the glass doors to Eddy’s backyard: I prepared myself to gatch a glimmer of blue because the Sun rises early enough to brighten a 6am sky. But there was none. I tried to collapse again, this time turning on my right side and shoving the pillow in between my thights. That also didn’t work. While the couch fit my length, it did not fit my girth (something Brian Regan complains about in brian regan UPS); my left arm could not find a comfortable place in between my chest and the crease of the couch.
So, I spent the rest of the night partially conscious and pretty uncomfortable. I also had one of those uncanny wake-ups where you find yourself staring at your phone obliging to turn off your planned alarm a mere thirty seconds before it’s supposed to go off: “Turn off alarm for 5:45am?” it asks, encouragingly. And how did I manage to awaken just before this thing rings?
The Morning Assembly
I wanted to arrive quite early because I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen at Nuclear Physics Day. Obviously, I paid attention to all of the preparatory deliberation that occurred offline in the weeks previously over email and through the single Zoom meeting. But I was still wholly unclear on what the schedule was. I was also completely alone in the District: While Jay and Devin had originally agreed to go with me, they pulled out pretty quickly when they realized that participating in this event required taking the two-and-a-half-hour drive up to . And that is why I borrowed Gary’s car for the day.
Was I about to come face-to-face with members of the House and Senate in a few hours? And what exactly was going to happen in these nebulous “meetings” that the organizers keep talking about?
I was only present momentarily for a bit of a fiasco that occurred on the briefing Zoom meeting about a week before our arrival in D.C… Somebody over Zoom voiced blatant opposition towards any endorsement of the Genesis Program—even though it was one of our original talking points. PUT THE ACTUAL EMAIL HERE
But it was more than evident to me that the physics community is really divided on how best to talk about the AI push from the government, specifically with regards to the Genesis Mission debacle. Of course, I imagined that such a possibility would occur within our field: AI comes to function as a major wedge in the field, with some scientists moshing and everybody else on the sidelines, murmuring in apprehension. But it is not just with respect to AI integration into the sciences that the agitation arises: Obviously, it is a political strategy espoused by an incompetent (among many other adjectives) administration. Do we really think that anybody in these offices actually knows how AI works even in a heuristic sense? It is what I call the belligerent application of AI.
I think I was the first graduate student there. And they didn’t lie: After I cleared the security checkpoint, I arrived at a fancy room that smelled of coffee, both caff. and decaf, and an assortment of cookies, croissants, muffins, and fruits. They had stocked up today! Tiered tables exhibiting a slight curvature away from the front of the room were attended to by large, comfortable chairs designed to seat more important people than me. I plopped myself down in one of them. And waited.
Oh, brother. Person after person arrived, clad in sharp attire, fit for a day in D.C… (Actually, some people really were dressed up, and some really were not. What kind of attire do you think of when you think of ? Yeah, use that as the benchmark here. Averaging over the population’s attire, I think mine came in slightly above average today. Whew!) And they didn’t stop coming! The furthest curved table was filled, then the
I saw somebody who graduated from my graduate program a few years ago. That made me upset. I wish Devin and Jay were here…
“Hello, everyone! I’m James Brown, one of the coordinators of Nuclear Physics Day.” James Brown? The singer? “Thanks to everyone for coming in today on this special day of the year to remind everyone why funding science is important, especially nuclear physics. Hopefully, we all were present at our Zoom debriefing last week. And I know a few people have fairly early meetings. So, I just want to open the floor for questions and clarification.”
“We don’t want to poke the bear,” Stephen Pate-Morales said.
Look, I agree with that. Obviously, we need strategy here. The strategy that everybody is banking on by showing support for Genesis is that this support will magically transfer over into support for fundamental science. It’s capitulation. But, sure, bargaining is political.
Then, it started: “Do we really want to”
“We decided to remove the Genesis Mission from our objective statement.” Wuu-huu, I silently cheered, unenthusiastically, to myself. Look, I was happy that we wouldn’t have to defend a belligerent application of artificial intelligence, but just because we cap the pot doesn’t mean the water isn’t boiling. There was a swell, a higher-order feeling of tension that this room
From listening to more and more of the clarifying questions and answer
I got the sense that we really didn’t actually know each other very well. On paper, we’re all physicists (or scientists), but actually none of us really know each other. A higher-order feeling emerged during that introductory
“So, I just want to make sure I understand this clearly and get it on record,” I started. “Should we talk about immigration?”
These people seemed to skirt around the fact that the Trump Administration recently systematically disenfranchied foreign nationals from easily participating in their experimental pursuits through a variety of wonderfully-inconveinent modifications to the VISA application process.
One of the major things that we were here to do was to advocate for science. So—naturally, right? Unless I am losing my mind—we ought to maintain that better attention be paid to issues of immigration.
As Uscho Khateborty once remarked back in 2023 when I spent time at SpinQuest, “…almost the entire collaboration [is from Sri Lanka].”
Now, it was finally clarified that who we would meet would likely not be the actual Reps or Senate members. Instead, it would be their staffers. Oh… On the “STEM Education Coalition” paper that I printed out the day before containing all of my schedule information, it said: “Sen. Tm Kaine (D-VA) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)” on it, a 3:00-3:30pm, 703 Hart Senate Office Building.
Sigh. Alright. Staffers. I can work with that. But you should definitely introduce me to the Reps next time.
The First Meeting
See, I was on the schedule for technically only a single meeting that day: one around 3:00 p.m. But I didn’t want to wait in anticipation that long! What was I supposed to do? Twiddle my fingers until 3 in the afternoon? I wanted to be useful. By golly, I drove all the way up here, alone, borrowing my friend’s damn car to attend this thing.
So, one of my first moves was to find the point person in charge of coordinating everybody’s meeting schedule.
Successfully, I filled a slot on an 11:30 a.m. meeting—with another fifth-year graduate student! His name was Daniel Valmassei. That made me feel a little bit better. After all, I didn’t really know these people well yet. Venturing into a pretty important political meeting with as much information about who was on my side as the staffer sitting across from me is a bit of a strange game to play. At least having another graduate student in the same year as me by my side establishes somewhat of an experiential bond. Doesn’t it?
He was dressed dashingly. In a dark, royal blue suit and tie, with his long, dark blond hair combed to exquisition, a low and gruff voice, admittedly this man upstaged me in every fashion. Alright, Alright. I conceed the fashion victory. I had a feeling, though, that if he and I walked into one of these offices, we would have a major impact on that staffer’s political subsequent activities.
But my first meeting was actually not my first meeting. I guess someone made a mistake when updating the online schedule. See, I was waiting outside Rep. H. Morgan Griffith’s office for about an hour and a half when I realized I was dangerously close to the beginning of the meeting and the fellow fifth-year graduate student was nowhere in sight. Panicked, I opened my phone to the website listing the meeting schedule and discovered that I wasn’t listed to meet this person in the first place. No! I was apparently scheduled to meet somebody completely different in an entirely different building with the main organizer herself. With about 15 minutes remaining, I dashed over to the other building looking like a complete crazy person, wondering if I would get thrown out by security.
She had a slightly concerned look on her face, with maybe some disappointment oozing out from the contours. Why were these buildings such mazes?! But she debriefed me p
I decided to hold my tongue about immigration and follow suit
“Hello,” she started. We took a seat on the long, brown-red soft. The staffer took a seat across from us on a slightly shorter sofa. It was just us three in that large, decorated room, at one of the highest levels of the political arena. I exhaled a long, decompressive breath in my mind.
“Hello!” he started, energetically. “So, what can I do for you today?”
My partner handed over the glossy, white folder—presumably with the pamphlets with typos removed. “Here are our asks for the Fiscal Year of 2027.”
“Aaaalirght,” he reved, and stood up to take the folder.
“Our main asks are that our major facilities, such as Oak Ridge National Lab and Jefferson National Lab, recieve a slight increase in what they received last year—$887 million—which accounts for yearly inflation. We also ask for funding for the Office of Science in the amount of $9.5 billion in the next Fiscal Year—this is the same level supported by the Energy Sciences Coalition. And we also advocate for the support of science funding for the NSF, in accordance with the 2023 NSAC Long Range Plan.”
“Yeah…” he said, pausing to glaze over the wall of text printed on our sheets of paper. There’s no way he’s actually reading this, right? “Okay, I remember this. Yeah, we will do our best to re”
Wait a second… Is that the end of it?
“So, I should introduce myself,” I blurted out. “I’m [some person], and I’m a fifth-year graduate student. Currently, I’m working on research that probes the fundamental structure of the proton. Now, as you know, the proton is a major constituent of matter! Right? It’s part of the nucleus—hence that term ‘nuclear physics.’” His eyes were widening a bit. He could sense the crazy. “Now, the proton is actually not a fundamental particle—we know it has sub-structure! And that’s my research broadly: How does that quantum sub-structure give rise to the fascinating—and stable—particle that we know and love called the proton?”
“Yeah…” He buffered. “I remember that [Rep. John McGuire (R-VA 5th)] said he wanted to do something with quantum computing…”
Quantum computing… Yeah, I’ve got you now.
“Oh, it’s interesting you mention that!” I started. “Our lab—which does this proton physics business—invests a lot of time in controlling cryogenic envrionments. That is super relevant for quantum computing because—think about it: Quantum computing is basically doing computations using individual atoms. So, if anything disturbes the state of the atom, then basically the whole computation goes bust!”
Oh, he’s waking up. Yes, he is. I could see it. When we first entered this quiet meeting room with the number of couches and chairs outnumbering people, this man wanted nothing more than to get the fuck out of there. Now, we’re talking about quantum computing. We’re talking about the world. We’re talking about how we progress into the future by making important decisions now.
“Can I ask you? What’s your connection to quantum computing?”
“Oh, I only heard of it a little bit of it in my bachelors.”
“Oh, yeah? Did you do any type of cryogenics or something?” I continued.
“Not really, but I did do mechanical engineering.” So, he was an engineer.
“You know, it’s interesting,” I started. Final comment, I gesticulated to my partner. “I technically work in fundamental physics, but there’s a whole host of other skills that I need to develop as well. For example: the cryogenics, of course! But I also was responsible in part for developing the software that remotely controls various components in our lab, and relays that data back to our systems. So, there’s physics, there’s engineering, there’s some software development.” Time to slow it down a little bit: reduce the intensity and valence a little. "So, you know, this kind of funding would really support the de
He rescinded slightly, as if adverse to the prospect of even funding anything scientifically important.
“Do you have anything to add?” I turned to my partner.
Conversational rules are typically not said out loud; they are usually determined iimplicitly and quietly. But, in a high-stakes environment like this one, these rules cannot be
I should take a damn bow. I think my meeting buddy was slightly taken aback at my energy level. Who the hell am I sitting next to? I imagined her thinking.
The Second Meeting
The second meeting was a lot less productive… and fun. A total of about 12 of us lined up outside of this Representative’s office like we were ready to breach-and-clear the damn place. And I was especially not thrilled to have stumbled upon the fact that somebody who was particularly insufferable to me (and several others) at my University decided to attend this political action. The fuck? I thought, in Ice Cube’s voice. I thought we buried you after you graduated. After being such a dirtbag to everybody interpersonally you want to show up at a political event and pretend that you stand for a noble cause?
Strangely, it was “great” to see me again. Uh-huh. Yeah, “great” to see you, too.
We entered the room. It was of the same volume and form as the previous one, but with a host of different decorations. A lot less gun insignia…
But this meeting was excrutiating. Within about five goddamn minutes, it appeared as if we already exhausted
It was evident that the staffer already knew who the hell we were: the lame, straggling scientists who just wanted a few more dimes on the dollar to conduct their impossibly complex and abstract experiments about Schrödinger’s cat and miniature black holes.
So, what do you do when the staffer already knows what you’re there to say and advocate for? Werewolf it up a bit! Oops! I mean, continue to inspire them to support science not only because of their political principles but out of a personal interest in the pursuit as well! If we can get these people to fall in love with the reasons and goals that we the researchers have, then they will be that much more significant in communicating to their representative the importance of funding science. And that’s what I did.
My hair turned furry, my back arched over.
“One of the major things my lab is trying to do is to understand the origin of what is called the proton’s ‘spin.’ Now, ‘spin’ is a property of particles that is completely quantum-mechanical in origin. The proton is particularly interesting, though, because it is actually made up of smaller particles… Do you know what they’re called?”
“Are they quarks?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, happily. (Obviously, gluons are also there.) A few in my group smiled, too. You see what I’m doing, guys? And it’s not like we’re going to run out of time here. “And each of those smaller particles also has a quantum spin. But we have learned that the proton’s spin itself is not merely the addition of all of the spins of the quarks’.”
And the proton forms the basis
Slowly, and surely, I was deflating. My energy was draining. There’s no saving this one, I thought. I could see the staffer also shrinking in extent.
We weren’t there to inspire, to impel, or to
We were there to monologue. To hot-potato the damn talking points.
Tell me: Is this really what lobbying (without the money) is? If so, then what the hell am I even doing up here in Washington? Look, we have zero dollars and zero cents to give these people to influence their next political decision. What do you do whe
We remind everybody that the human spirit is not governed by these numbers but by passions! Passions!
I will mention that there was one person in that group who really did do an excellent job communicating the actually relevant points here.
After a few more barely-relevant comments about why science is important to fund because it’s cool and because we do experiments and we need money and the universities and the workforce and the future generations and intellectual pursuit and bolstering the United States, the meeting exhausted. I believe we were out of there in about 20 minutes, when our slot was allocated for 30. Her final words?“Yeah,” she paused. “Like I said, we’re going to continue to support funding in this area. We thank you for your continued support.” Her eyes read dull; she wanted out of this excrutiating focus group. And, hell, so did I.
The Third Meeting
I was totally late to the third meeting. It turned out that today was not only Nuclear Physics Day, but also everybody-come-to-Washington-D.C.-to-lobby day, and so the lines outside each one of these buildings was bent and wrapping around the corners of the sidewalks. I happily found somebody familiar in the line to talk to: a postdoc reseacher stationed at J-Lab. He and I had an enthralling conversation about “GPDs for heavy nuclei.” That was because my research was technically about fancy structure fu
I thought getting to the building a whole thirty minutes early would provide me with enough time to meet the group that I was going into battle with and work out a few things that we wanted to say.
They did not comment on the length of these lines today in the morning, I thought to myself, irritated. That would certainly be something to point out.
Finally, we got into the building. We still
Oh, God! I thought. Every single pair of eyes turned to face us. My face stung in embarrassment.
It was from that moment onward that I thought to myself that I actually needed to make up for the tardiness by being useful to this group.
“Yeah, and, um… Just to—just to comment on the Genesis Mission,” someone in front of me started. What the hell are you doing?! I screamed. You don’t just release that into the wild! Especially because we had the major debriefing this morning about not bringing it up without elicitation!
I was losing it. As this guy continued to bable
Look, I am being harsh. But if you had one moment, one opportunity to communicate to these staffers, completely bored out of their mind. Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?
Look: They’re already going to support our damn cause.
As I told Jay over Discord:
I think it might be time for me to go [werewolf] mode. I needed to injection a little silliness and craziness in there—in just the right amount.
And as I told Josh over Discord:
I had to turn into a little bit of the werewolf.
“To provide a little more context to that,” I found myself spontaneously chiming in. People turned their head towards me. “There is a sub-field of machine learning called adversarial machine learning. You no doubt have heard that machine learning and artificial intelligence tools frequently are classified as black box technologies. The field of adversarial machine learning structinizes artificial intelligence systems, trying to determine wherein lie the faults of the system. As you are aware, image classification techniques are relatively robust—they can provide a classification of what object is featured in an image with some level of confidence. But what happens when I wear a cat shirt?” I gesticulated enormously. People were getting the point. I was also pretty certain that nobody at this table knew exactly what AML was. So far, so good. Keep it up.
“What we wish to impart here is that this nascent technology, while indeed quite fascinating and powerful, is still not well-understood enough that we exert predictive control over it! And, as physicists—all of us sitting around this table-- we like to know the ins-and-outs of the technologies we use. After all, we’re the ones coming up with all the theories of the fundamental constituents of matter and quantum mechanics and all that jazz.” Yes, this is working! I thought. I could see a crack of exuberance on the face of the male staffer. This guy is absolutely nuts, we he was probably thinking. Good, I though to him in return. You’ll remember me, too.
“In that regard—if I may continue for just a little longer,” I politely informed my fellow scientists, to let them know my communication plans, “One of the major goals for my lab at the University is to enable what we call ‘autonomous control’ of our lab by using artificial intelligence. That means we provide all of the relevant information about our lab infrastructure—from various sensor readings to software statuses—to the AI system and have it effectively ‘steer our ship.’ Now, wouldn’t it be a major catastrophe if we did not fully know what the ins-and-outs of this AI-controlled system were?”
There was a little bit of silence after my monologue. From my reading of the room, I think many were glad that I had soft-protected the Genesis Mission debacle from erupting.
The meeting ended shortly. On the top floor of the Hart Senate Office Building, I gazed down at the fancy, black sculpture on the ground floor.
And, a mere 20 minutes later,
A Final Review: In Summary
It was evident to me that my most effective and important meeting was most certainly the first one, in which me and one other person came face-to-face with somebody who, by political principle, was not enthusiastic to fund research: “It’s science. Ewww,” was the basic principle. I think my werewolfing helped out a little bit there. The major idea at play there is to remind those so entrenched in the political game that they actually are inquisitive and curious like the rest of us, but they’ve done a lot of fancy gymnastics to convince themselves that they are not. In the spirit of the book , my style of science communication is founded on the analogous “Scientist, Come Home.” In my view, like we are all readers, we are all naturally curious about the world in which we live. Let’s remember that.
My second meeting was the most excruiating.
What was most anti-climactic was that the meeting ended in an asynchronous fashion. The group fizzled out. There was no conclusion to complement the bright-and-early introductory meeting. It would have been not only more productive but also more fun to get together once more and perhaps go over what we learned from the day, and maybe try to assemble groups for dinner! Otherwise, all the postdocs at J-Lab just drive home all alone with tears in their eyes back to Newport News even though they might have had an excellent series of meetings today. A major part of political action comes from collectively assessing the impact of a political movement/meeting so that we know how and where to hit them next time.
We did none of that. Nuclear Physics Day felt inconsequential after everything.
So I guess to Dupont Circle I go to say goodbye to Eddy…
Notes/References:
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“…something Brian Regan complains about in brian regan UPS.” This is Brian Regan’s special, but the clip is brian regan UPS: “chhhh We need to know the weight and the girth.”
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“…my left arm could not find a comfortable place in between my chest and the crease of the couch.” Emo nerd smashes his room, anybody?
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“J-Lab” stands for Jefferson National Laboratory. It is an accelerator laboratory that is based in . Let’s just say that it’s not the best of places to maintain residency…
